“South Park” mocks everything under the sun, including all religions. But when it makes fun of Muhammad, its creators’ lives are threatened and Comedy Central censors the show.

All this is in the last two weeks. But this kind of intimidation – and capitulation – is going on all the time.

Remember when Burger King recalled its ice-cream cones in the U.K. because someone thought the ice-cream swirl logo looked a little too much like the way “Allah” is written in Arabic, and Burger King didn’t want to offend Muslims?

Or when “2012” director Roland Emmerich, after initially including Mecca on his list of religious shrines to demolish in his apocalyptic blockbuster, ended up writing the Islamic holy place out of the script (while merrily destroying the gigantic Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro)? “I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” Emmerich said about mangling Mecca. “But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right. … We have to all … in the Western world … think about this.”

Yes, let’s think about this.

Why do you think “alleged” Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan was able to shoot almost 50 people and kill 13, even though dozens of officials knew full well that he was an insane jihadist nutcase long before his murderous spree last November?

So embarrassed is the Obama administration about this right now that it is stonewalling the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in its efforts to find out just what Army brass knew about Hasan and when they knew it. Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, the committee’s chairman and ranking Republican, took the extraordinary step of subpoenaing both Obama’s Justice Department and his Defense Department to pry loose some long-awaited answers – but they’re being stiffed. Even the Washington Post calls this what it really is: bureaucratic CYA.

What’s wrong with us? Almost a decade after 9/11, why do we have such a hard time getting a firm grip on how to deal with all things Islamic?

As I explain in “How Evil Works” – in a chapter titled “How Terrorism Really Works” – a very good way to understand our difficulty dealing with Islam is by thinking about the Stockholm syndrome, named after the 1973 Swedish bank robbery during which four terrorized hostages mysteriously became so sympathetic toward their two captors that they ended up siding with the enemy.

In a nutshell, the syndrome, which has been vexing law-enforcement psychologists since long before it had a name, amounts to this: when we’re seriously intimidated, especially if we fear for our lives, some of us start to side with whomever or whatever is bullying us. I’m not talking just about cooperating with a captor as a survival strategy, but rather a deep-down transformation of loyalties in favor of the people threatening us. We see this in high-profile cases that break into the news cycle like those of Patty Hearst, Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard. But our lives are made up of less extreme, and harder-to-discern, examples of the exact same dynamic.

Let’s take a look at “how evil works.”

Radical Islam is extremely intimidating – by design. The more crazy it acts, the more powerful it becomes. Just a few weeks ago, in Nigeria, Muslim gangs slaughtered 500 Christians, including many children, pregnant women and old people, hacking them to death with machetes. Imagine the boost that provided to Islamic recruitment in neighboring villages.

Islam has spread in this way – “at the point of a sword” – for centuries. As I reveal in my new book, “How Evil Works,” I personally lost many family members, perhaps over 100, in the genocide of the Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks. I tell how my great-grandfather, a Protestant minister, was martyred, along with 60 or 70 other clergymen and their wives, in Adana, Turkey, because they refused to convert on the spot to Islam. This is how it spreads, by traumatizing people. Many, just to survive, convert.

So, the murderous Islamic tantrums we keep hearing about have a certain dark logic to them, in terms of enabling the spread of Islam. Remember the Danish Muhammad cartoons, which resulted in over 50 deaths? Or when Newsweek reported (incorrectly) that someone at Gitmo flushed a Quran down the toilet, which led to at least 15 deaths? Or the Miss World contest in Nigeria, when a single comment by a newspaper columnist about the beauty of contestants led to insane Muslim rioting in which rioters massacred over 200 people with machetes, or beat them to death or burned them alive – all because of a single sentence a newspaper columnist wrote, which wasn’t even offensive?

America, Europe and Britain today, in the way they deal with radical Islam and the terrorist threat, reveal something very akin to a low-grade, widespread Stockholm syndrome.

We desperately want to avoid offending Muslims. Why is this? After all, we constantly offend Christians. Just ask Franklin Graham. But you see, Christians don’t have murderous tantrums and burn down other religions’ houses of worship and cut off people’s heads and commit terrorist acts. Radical Muslims do.

Do you know the real reason we’re so tolerant of subversive Islamic groups within the U.S. like CAIR, which FBI agents have characterized as a “turnstile for terrorists and their supporters,” and why we’re so tolerant of the hundreds of Saudi-funded mosques within our borders preaching and teaching hatred of American values, and why we’re so tolerant of taxpayer-funded Muslim chaplains leading large-scale jailhouse conversions to Islam?

We like to think we’re tolerant because we’re so enlightened, open-minded, pluralistic and caring. In truth, it’s because we’re intimidated by Islam, and as a result of that secret fear, this splendid sympathy toward Islam blooms within our breast. We have no clue as to its origin, but being so tolerant makes us feel good about ourselves. It also makes us feel safe, since we’re no longer on the “wrong side” of Islam. Meanwhile, expansionist Islam stealthily enlarges its subversive footprint on America and her institutions. This is the Stockholm syndrome writ large.

Bottom line: we feel threatened by the bully, so we act nice in hopes he won’t hurt us. Our thinking is so jangled by this dynamic that even after the Fort Hood attack, the Pentagon, in its 86-page postmortem report analyzing the event, somehow didn’t see fit to mention the word “Muslim,” “Islam” or “jihad.” This is reminiscent of the “Harry Potter” stories, where everyone is so spooked by the villain Voldemort that they are afraid even to utter his name.

Ironically, people in the grip of jihadist fervor – themselves victims of the indoctrination and overwhelming cruelty endemic in the Arab-Muslim world – have nothing but contempt for our weakness and appeasement, which actually enlarges the evil within them. As president, Ronald Reagan understood “how evil works.” He knew such madness is neutralized only by strength. That’s why his watchword was “Peace through strength.”

But we, in a little over two decades, have witnessed the “fundamental transformation” of our nation from “morning in America” under Reagan to the turbulent and chaotic age of Obama. In the current climate of official appeasement, our government is like the clueless parents of a teenage boy with an explosive anger problem. He’s out of control, a danger to himself and others, and everyone around him is trying to be ever-so-nice, to placate him and keep him from getting angry again. Yet paradoxically, the more they walk on eggshells around him, the more his contempt and rage toward them is inflamed. So now the “well-meaning grown-ups” just don’t know what to do. Since they don’t comprehend that they’re fueling the problem, everything they do to “help” just makes him worse and brings on ever-bigger tantrums.

“As long as the West becomes continually weaker and more contemptible in its attempts to placate Islam, the conflict will just intensify. In fact, believe it or not, it is our weakness that is actually fueling the growth of Islamofascism. That’s right: when you behold the ever-increasing radicalization, arrogance and fury of today’s jihadists, realize that we are literally feeding it. We’re nurturing it. We’re rocking the cradle.”